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I'm not sure that's really the case,I'm sure plenty of other writers give interviews,it's just that they're hardly ever translated.

Then why do we never hear about them?

Tiger and Bunny was a very popular, generally well-received, and very well-selling anime original. Many in the west liked it for its superhero and sci-fi action motifs. It was definitely one of my favorite anime shows of 2011.

I honestly don't even know who wrote Tiger and Bunny. Why didn't his or her name get out there like Okada's did?

How does that not make sense? If a bad work is somehow turned into a good work by the anime staff, then the anime staff should be credited first. If the opposite happens -an originally good work getting a bad adapation- then the anime staff should be blamed. If the anime adaptation is faithful to the original work, then the original author should be credited first and foremost.

Even for a faithful adaptation, the only elements retained from the original work are the plot and characters. Everything else (including the dialogue) is the responsibility of the anime staff. It should be really obvious that there are lots of parts of writing in addition to this.

There are some rare cases where all of the dialogue is taken from the original work, but even there, an anime has to make trade-offs to retain it. And of course, the writer had to decide what portion to retain and what portion to eliminate.

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Originally Posted by Kanon

And once again, I'm not saying we should credit only the original creators. That would be unfair. However, crediting the anime writer over the original writer is even more unfair imo, unless the writer made so much changes it can be considered a different work from the original.

Why would it be unfair unless everything was retained full-cloth? We praise musicians for good performances all the time, and we usually don't care who wrote their music. Most original creators have no creative input on their adapted anime save for a few very rare exceptions.

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Originally Posted by Kanon

I think I have a decent grasp of what they do, but it's hard to know which of the director or writer has more influence on the adaptation.

This functions the same way for adapted works as it does for original ones. A show is a collaboration between many individuals, and all of them deserve credit for their work. In particular, the creative portions have to be well done for a show to be good.

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Originally Posted by Kanon

Totoum brought up some very good examples. Plus, it's not rare for several writers to work together. That doesn't make it easy to know who to credit exactly, since I assume each team works differently. Only interviews can help us (it helped a lot for Fractale and Hanasaku Iroha, to keep this Okada related), but we don't always have access to that kind of information.

If you're really interested in apportioning individual accomplishment, you can look at what elements of a particular work contribute the most to its success and so on. It usually isn't that hard to have an idea of what the different positions were responsible for. Just look for clues like what episodes the series composer/story editor wrote, and how loose the plot is.

Take Black Rock Shooter TV as an example. What clips I've seen of this show feature some truly atrocious writing. Most of this is the fault of Okada Mari, but Yoshioka Shinobu was the director and he had the authority to veto the crazy things she came up with. And so, the result can only be so bad because both of them did a poor job.

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Originally Posted by Guardian Enzo

Don't get me wrong - I adore the manga and it's Hourou Musuko at its finest, but Okada was faced with a manga that was already almost 100 chapters and told to try and make something decipherable out of it in 11 episodes. She made some very difficult decisions (like cutting out the entire elementary-school section, 33 chapters) except in flashback, and in doing so incurred the wrath of manga readers. But the end result was a really superb anime that captured the essence of the manga very well.

A high-level decision like this isn't solely made at the discretion of the writer - the director probably made the final call. However, how this story was executed was probably left to Okada Mari.

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Originally Posted by Triple_R

Then why do we never hear about them?

It depends on what other show the writer was responsible for. To be fair, most directors don't get talked about as much as they deserve as well, and we almost never hear about most other creative staff like the sound director and so on. It would seem that this is more a problem of this forum than anything else.

__________________

The victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won...

Tiger and Bunny was a very popular, generally well-received, and very well-selling anime original. Many in the west liked it for its superhero and sci-fi action motifs. It was definitely one of my favorite anime shows of 2011.

I honestly don't even know who wrote Tiger and Bunny. Why didn't his or her name get out there like Okada's did?

Well that's a very good question and I definitely don't have an clear answer.

Though I want to clarify that when I mean they give interviews,I mean they do interviews about the projects they're working on,not that they all talk about their childhood like Okada did in the interview that was translated.

It's not like T&B's writer is hiding or anything , His name's Nishida Masafumi , here's a translated interview and there's more interviews (notably one in the same magazine as the Okada interview that got translated) but they havn't been translated.
He has a blog as well

Though I guess the fact he comes from live action (T&B was his first anime) and doesn't plan on really being an anime writer may have something to do with it.

I really am surprised at how much I ended up liking Blast of Tempest. Perhaps it's how Aika Fuwa was a great character and they slowly went about fleshing out her in flashbacks.

I was tempted to put as a question in that thread about why Okada decided to have one of the characters from Anohana cross dress or if Okada and/or Kawamori did AKB0048 Episode 6 just to deal with "haters". (And I still have a lot of AKB0048 to watch, but I am really liking that series.)

Ah, I posted a few questions myself. Including the more infamous questions that run around a lot.

Though it is funny that people have noted that Okada has a knack for having interest in childhood friends in a good light. It's interesting because this is also notoriously a tendency for those to be pretty disadvantaged when it comes to anime romances.

I love some of her shows, but not all. That said, the same can be said for pretty much anyone I "like" in the anime industry. I don't know that I really agree that she has a signature style to her work, as I feel her work covers a very wide spectrum (unlike some of my other favorite people in anime, who tend to have a far more narrow focus, ie: Tomino, Kenji Kamiyama, etc). I don't hold that against her, as I suspect very few people in anime actually get to choose everything they work on (or, hey, maybe she does get to choose, and has a much wider palate than others).

I do think the hate sent her way has some roots in sexism, but that's fine. I've never been a moral purveyor of equality; people are people, and the idea that they will just magically change at the snap of a finger is hogwash in my book.

Her best work, imo, was Lupin III: The Woman called Fujiko Mine, and the hate aimed at that show pretty much embodied the hate directed at her as a person. Though, Zetsuen no Tempest and the amount of angst over her in the discussion thread painted the hate in fairly stark terms as well.

As Sayo Yamamoto never really did manage to shatter the glass ceiling, I view Mari Okada as bearing that torch in the industry now (for women in that role), though I do think Sayo Yamamoto was/is the superior talent.

-Emo.ripe music or maybe crappy substitute (Why??)
- A lot of it is Ohana <3 Which is fine, and the best part of the video. Does that imply Ohana is her most memorable creation? Maybe.
- No Wandering Son but Gosick?
- Too much BRS
- Minko !?
- There appears to be scenery from what appears to be True Tears, but I guess people are still too mad at it for it to be actual footage.
- Anohana rocket (insert crying here)

-Emo.ripe music or maybe crappy substitute (Why??)
- A lot of it is Ohana <3 Which is fine, and the best part of the video. Does that imply Ohana is her most memorable creation? Maybe.
- No Wandering Son but Gosick?
- Too much BRS
- Minko !?
- There appears to be scenery from what appears to be True Tears, but I guess people are still too mad at it for it to be actual footage.
- Anohana rocket (insert crying here)

How is nano.RIPE emo? Either way, they put that in because Hanasaku Iroha is basically defined by their music.

The video could have been better for sure. Wish they showed Sakurasou on her list of awesome series too.

So she is coming over to Southern California (Perhaps a bit too close to comfort, but a few hundred miles away. )'s anime expo. Wonder if anyone is within range.

But man, that promo video they did for her doesn't make her look very good imo.

-Emo.ripe music or maybe crappy substitute (Why??)
- A lot of it is Ohana <3 Which is fine, and the best part of the video. Does that imply Ohana is her most memorable creation? Maybe.
- No Wandering Son but Gosick?
- Too much BRS
- Minko !?
- There appears to be scenery from what appears to be True Tears, but I guess people are still too mad at it for it to be actual footage.
- Anohana rocket (insert crying here)

I plan on attending her panel and hearing what she has to say about her works. As for your points:
-The song is "Yumeji" (second PV song/ ED for episodes 8/26 of Hanasaku Iroha)
-The PV doesn't seem to have more Iroha focus than any other series.
-Anime Expo likely picked titles that have been/have good chances of being licensed in NA and are well known.
-Meh
-Why wouldn't a main character in Iroha be featured in the PV?
-The footage is from the second Hanasaku Iroha ending animation, not true tears.
-Meh

They are promoting her as if shes some sappy teen drama/romcom idol writer ... which I guess makes sense from a marketing perspective, but unfortunately it does really do her justice if the intention was to portray her in a positive light.

Her best two involvements were True Tears and Wandering Son because unlike the rest of the involvements it doesn't reek heavily reek in sappy melodrama nor slapstick comedy but unfortunately these weren't exactly the most popular, though for whatever reason PA Works keeps pushing out True Tears cameos whenever they can wherever they can.

I guess from her most "commercialized" involvements, the best would Hanasaku Iroha, Anohana and Sakurasou and as much as I bitch about them two I have to concede and say they are some of the best in their respective genres in recent years and at the very least I enjoyed them. Too much slapstick comedy and melodrama for my tastes (and feels a bit juvenile), but hey I'm not the target audience. She's no Makoto Shinkai, Mamoru Hosoda or Mitsuru Adachi in terms of quality slice of life/drama writing but from a "idol writer" perspective she's at least better than the rest of the competition.

At the very least, I guess you could respect her for diversifying as much as she can as she's been dwelling into fantasy and sci-fi (albeit they're mostly not very good) at times. Quite overrated, but there's a lot worse writers.

EDIT: I totally forgot about Toradora in terms of commercialized involvements. That was pretty decent too and falls in the same boat.

How is nano.RIPE emo? Either way, they put that in because Hanasaku Iroha is basically defined by their music.

The video could have been better for sure. Wish they showed Sakurasou on her list of awesome series too.

Bwaha, it's just my nickname making fun of them for that whiny pop punk that is popular over here. Nothing serious.

But there's no doubt that Hanairo was a dominant theme of the video, which doesn't really matter to me. Just thinks it's funny. It's a good thing I like Ohana's likeness too much that I can claim she deserves the whole video.

Some romantic comedy/drama that has Kugrie as the main female lead. You wouldn't have heard of it.

Sounds dreadful. I can't say I'm a fan of either.

Anyhow, yea, I agree with you here:

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They are promoting her as if shes some sappy teen drama/romcom idol writer ... which I guess makes sense from a marketing perspective, but unfortunately it does really do her justice if the intention was to portray her in a positive light.

When in reality, Okada is much more versatile than that. There is much more than just "cry, cry, cry" and cheesy melodrama. In a lot of cases, she might be pigeonholed like Key Visual Arts tends to get such, though I believe you feel that Okada does it better anyways. A part of me wonders what would have happened had she'd be allowed to do "Little Busters!" considering "Super Peace Busters" in Anohana, but we'll never know but success rate is higher with adaptations. The help of a director like Nagai in Anohana makes a big deal too.

I guess they think shows with adult characters like Mine Fujiko won't sell to this crowd even if Fujiko spends a good portion of her time on-screen in her birthday suit. They could have easily found a few G or PG moments to include. Heck, it's even licensed by Funimation and still doesn't make the video.

It's interesting that with the reputation she's gotten people forget she started out writing kid's shows for sunrise,though I do find it interesting that she hasn't worked with sunrise in years

Isn't she writing one atm? I think I read up on ANN or somewhere that she was though I totally forgot what it was about and with which studio.

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Nagi no Asukara was confirmed for fall, so it'll be the Okada show of 2013 considering she's actually slowed down a bit compared to the last couple years.

What about AKB0048? s2

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True Tours Nanto raws are out, can't find any subs though.There's six 7 minutes episode and Okada wrote 4 of them (1,2,5 and 6)

They've been out for a quite a long time now and the only subs available are Chinese ones. I watched the raw and I understood maybe like 20% of the dialogue but atmosphere wise it felt like True Tears which just makes me even more mad since everyone knows how much of a TT fanboy I am. Ep 5 and 6 in particular was amazing. I even asked Archon Wing to go watch it and translate it for me but that useless sack of meat doesn't even know his mother language!